LEMON

LEMON: A Large Endoscopic MONocular Dataset and Foundation Model for Perception in Surgical Settings

Chengan Che, Chao Wang, Tom Vercauteren, Sophia Tsoka, Luis C. Garcia-Peraza-Herrera

CVPR 2026

LEMON is a large-scale open-access surgical video dataset comprising 4,194 long-form videos, approximately 938 hours of footage, and 85 million frames across 35 surgical procedures.

To curate this dataset, we developed a highly automated pipeline for collecting, filtering, and processing unconstrained surgical videos. We further pretrained LemonFM on LEMON using an augmented self-distillation framework, producing transferable visual representations for surgical video understanding.

LemonFM achieves strong performance across multiple downstream tasks, including surgical phase recognition, tool and action recognition, and semantic segmentation.

Paper · Code